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Get your headphones on and listen to this master of mood make his way across the undulating sands, the wet guitar reverb, warbling organs, crystal-clear claves, and snaking melodies sounding like surf music for a desert holiday.
Billy Martin’s drumming makes me think of oxymorons like “precisely sloppy” and “intensely casual” and “red hot chill out”. This album lives within a zone that’s hazily bounded by funk, jazz, and electronic dance music.
The surprising part is not that this Quebec outfit mixing country music, folk, surf, and a dash of Elvis exists, but that they have been doing this for three decades plus and yours truly is just finding out.
A return, and the word to use is "unabated." Their pummeling approach may seem to lack nuance, but it's not about how the punches are landing, it's about the pauses in between that make this measured approach to aggression particularly satisfying.
The guitar and bass strings are vibrating cosmically, the drums eat up the miles, an ethereal chorus swirls about. It's not a new formula, but it's done very well, and if you need to drive for sixty miles without noticing the time go by, here you go.
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